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Making a Wet Pallete

I recently wrote a small "how to" piece on Making and How To Use a Wet Palette which I would like to share with you. Okay your thinking I get the "make a wet palette" bit but "how to use it" seems a little like teaching Nana how to suck eggs. Fair cop too, but let me suggest that all is not what it seems once you have a wet palette at your disposal some quite interesting new techniques for mixing paint and applying it can be employed, but first we need to get cracking on making the wet palette.

So a few of the basics first, lets be clear what we mean when using the term palette, I suspect you already have come to the conclusion I'm not referring to the type that is useful when handling 50 20kg sacks of fertilizer... please say yes. The palette I'm talking about, well it is usually defined as a small surface used by
an artist to mix and dilute paints seems a simple enough
description and should suit us fine as figure painters.

Palettes
can come in all manner of shapes and sizes, depending on your
creativity, spending habit and the way you like to paint, they can range
from a simple flat surface, say for instance, a plate or a tile to
purpose made commercially available palettes with recesses of varying
sizes and sometimes depth to store your paints and keep them separated
while you work.

a cheap pencil box makes do for my wet palette

So
why use a palette? What’s wrong with getting your paint straight out of
the pot? A palette provides you with a space to dilute your paints to
the right consistency, mix shades and protect your paint pots from
drying out. I suspect most of us use a palette of some description rather than paint
straight from the pot, good grief I've been known to use my thumb nail when doing a little touch up *uh hum* I actually have a
spot of dark brown on mine right now from a little job last
night.........

Now that we have got a rough description of what a
palette is and why we should use one I want to move on to the subject of "wet palette’s" and why you might try using them. I’m not going to get involved in why
other people use or not use wet palettes I’m going to approach it from a
personal view point and you may find some of my reasoning may apply to
you.

three grey tones taken from their pots placed on the palette and the first mixed and diluted shade to the front of them

Some
background first, I live in Queensland Australia and during our summers
things can get pretty hot, in fact the winter’s although cold can be
very short and your quickly back into warm day time temps. I found I was
constantly have to re-dilute my paint or mixing up new batches. At
that time I was using a white ceramic plate as my palette, still do when
weather permits. The situation was getting out of hand and I was on the
verge of throwing a 'tanty' when I decided to give the wet palette a
try.

I like to keep a dry pallet handy for making up glazes from my wet palette

I
first became aware of ‘wet palette’ from a blog article around 2009 and although interesting I didn’t pay it much heed, indeed I
wasn’t sure if it really worked, the principle of a wet palette is
fairly simple so instead of tanty throwing put it to the test. All we need to do is provide an environment that prevents our
paints from drying out too quickly while we are using them and the solution is
simplicity itself, what’s more it is dead easy to make one at home.

So
what is needed?
1. A shallow tray, I use a pencil box from K-mart (cost me
all of one fiddy) but any shallow container will do, the pencil box is
great because it has a lid but if you have cling film at home you have a
lid.
2. Some thin sponge as our water reservoir, paper towel will do as a
stand in.
3. Baking paper, that’s the type that has a shiny surface on both
sides, grease proof (shiny on one side) will do as a standby but it
isn’t as durable so next time your in the supermarket get baking paper
4. Some water, you should be able to get that!

24
hours later, you can see the pooled paint is still usable, however I'm
now done with these colours so time to change the baking paper

OK,
take your sponge cut it to slightly smaller than the size of your tray,
sponges grow a bit when wet. Wet the sponge and then ring most of the
water out of the sponge and place it into the tray. With paper towel cut
it to size place a 1-2mm of water in the tray and place the paper towel
on top, about 5 layers of paper towel will do but you can adjust this
as needed.

Cut your baking paper to size and place this on top of the
sponge/towel, if your using grease proof make sure the shiny side is up
(very important) and close the lid or cover with cling film and leave it
for about an hour, that’s it done, it is ready to go. You can now place
your paint on the baking paper, the paper absorbs a small amount of
water from the reservoir (sponge) keeping the paint moist and usable.

time to change the paper, you can clearly see the thin sponge

If
you keep the thing sealed when not in use your paint will stay usable
for the best part of a couple of days during summer and up to three or more days if your in
cooler climes. The paper will allow you to blend your colours as normal
but be careful, the paper will eventually start to fray if you work the
paint too much with your brush, but it’s easily replaced and you will
probably be changing the paper before that happens anyway.

placing some new baking paper, close the lid and wait for about an hour to let things settle and then start painting

I went to use a nice big "Tupper Ware" container (about 30mm
deep) at first, warning, if your other half has quality brand plastics in
her kitchen leave it be, get your arse down to the dollar shop!

I'll follow up with a practical demonstration of colour blending using the wet palette in coming weeks.